1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to the field of digital audio, and more specifically, to ways of deriving a score useful for meaningfully comparing portions of digital audio.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is valuable to be able to meaningfully compare two sequences of music or other digital audio, e.g., to find matching sub-sequences within the music. To that end, it is useful to quantify the degree of correspondence of the individual units (“chromae”) that make up the sequences and sub-sequences, as well as to quantify the degree of correspondence of the sub-sequence as a whole.
Conventional measures of degrees of correspondence of audio units and sub-sequences typically lack inherent meaning. For example, for some measures, a score of 3 might indicate a strong match, but for other measures, a score of 3 might indicate a weak match, with a score of 72 indicating a strong match. Similarly, conventional measures do not inherently convey how much stronger a score of 11 is than a score of 10, or how much weaker a score of 9 is than a score of 10, or whether two matches with a score of 5 represent as good a match as a single match with a score of 10. Thus, these conventional measures require additional empirical knowledge to be able to properly interpret and apply the resulting scores.